Whaling Rock

Midnight was the right time to do this. But isn’t it always? In the old tongue they’d call this time the novel moment, a cliché in it’s predictability. But there are no more clichés; there are no books.

My hiking boots kick up rocks and flesh alike—they are new, or as new as you could get from a dead drifter—as I stumble off the paved path through the gorge. Stumble is what I do, though in my mind’s eye it’s from gusto and guts, chutzpah or moxy, not ill-worn leather shoes and a night-blindness that makes me think I was born in a city. I was not. This is my mantra.

Sophie follows along behind me, slower than I and three times as graceful; I detest her for her deer-like precision. Suburban Sophie, ¼ acre home and a pissant yard Soph. The only dog she could get was a foxie, because they’re the size of a Great Dane’s dropping. Feisty until they one day hunted something that hunted back. Someone forgot to beat their own mortality into their tiny heads.

Is this what I’m doing, dragging Sophie out of our newfound quarter home to the whaling rocks at highmoon because no one remembered to bleed me after I turned five? No recollection of my lifeforce draining out, a reminder that all we are is shells for the mainland creatures. Legs and arms like us, eyes and ears like us, but the spaces between bone and flesh slides, shifting under the weight of its own lie. We are suits to them. The mouths give them away, the elders say when they think we deserve their words. Words of those who survived the hunt. Two sets of teeth and the hint of blue tongue. The blue, I think, is the lack of oxygen. Or the absence of red.

Matra said the blue was a lie, and the teeth were just pointed, not doubled. I like her version better. Our own flat bones, sharpened as stones are made sharp, acting as clunky curtains over sharper, rooted teeth, was much scarier.

‘How far?’ Soph whispers.

My hush is a hiss in the full night air. An inhale a taste; salt, brine, and a dank undertone that could only mean a corpse had washed up on shore again.

We were close, feet now scrabbling for purchase on rocks that had stood for a million years, now flaking at the creases between colours. We tread the short cliff face that had seen the rise and fall of our species. ‘Not far.’

What we hunted was the sigh. A sharp exhale of air and water: the Whaling Rock. I’d heard whispers about it around the elders when they drank and forgot I served them, dipping between chairs and refilling from a limited supply. Limitless, that’s what I made. An illusion at best but even Soph would be surprised by how far a thing could stretch if you didn’t mind it seeming a little off. Fish, scarce at the best of times, stuffed with dried and rehydrated seaweed, mushrooms soaked in fat from the pans filling their gullets before they were scaled. Scaling keeps the flavour in, Matra would say before sluicing their mirrored pieces onto the floor in a shower. She’d know, I guess. She was a chef before the Isle became home. I thought scales kept bad things out? I’d asked once. Wearing them on my hands, tiny sharp edges biting into me over their strong suctioned body. 2D pearls, compressed into armour.

Don’t these protect them? I’d asked. Matra didn’t bother lying to me after my 14th birthday. She made me cake. That was enough pantomine for us. 'Not from anything that could actually hurt them,' she'd replied.

The elders joke about the rock, the sighing coming up from beneath the ocean, a woman perpetually unhappy and breathing out the suffering. I wanted to hear it for myself, I wanted to know once and for all if she was truly unhappy. Her children had strayed so far, the tale went, that she called and called until her voice ate away stone and salt, layers of earth in turn until one last breath took her true voice away. All we have now is her empty larynx, air moving through it but not touching her soul. She has become a doorway with no latch.

Soph and I are close now. The wind drops off as we dangle from a rocky outcrop, clamber over roots and nearly fall into the gorge. We don’t look at it. The blood still soaked our nets from hunting turtles here. We didn’t know what they were at first, but Matra knew. Matra had to tell the elders, and we had to show them were we found it. A gorge makes sense; what predator would swim into such a violent whirlpool of rock and foam?

A strange night followed the turle hunt. The town ate better than it had in months, and we were celebrated before being punished for straying so far close to the shore on our own. The sea is full of dangerous things, things made before the hunt, and little else now. Far less now, I think, leaping the final gaping maw between two huge segments of cliff face. Soph almost doesn’t make it, and I relish her stumble even as my stomach drops to my feet. We collapse together, me pulling her over, and for a moment neither laughs. Then we do. This is how we work; we wait to hear a heartbeat and delight in it’s rebellious rhythm. That is not the only reason we laugh.

We are here.

A slumbering beast nestles at the mouth of the gorge, barely buffering the raging high tide as it slips and swells past it into the large ravine. Foamy high waves slap its eastern surface. The large crab atop the Whaling Rock is undisturbed until Soph nails it with a rock, scuttling to leap back into water that can’t stay one colour. Between waves, the sea pulls back with trailing fingers of scummy foam, a beige-dirt hue over obsidian depths. When it crashes in I swear I see it lighten without daylight. But I am distracting myself. The rock doesn’t look impressive at all, and I am disappointed. I expected at least a whale-shaped tail curved upward in a confusing arch; falling or rising? Neither. If there was ever a tail, it has eroded away. Likewise, the body of it is lower than I expected, barely thrice my height, and the sides slope too gradually to be a whale. We had pictures of them, harbingers of great luck nowadays. Whole towns could eat for a year if an adult washed up. All we ever got now were the babies, sickly pale things with pieces missing out of their fins that you didn’t think about for too long. We could eat them, but each feast brought a sense of loss. Of grief.

Last time a calf washed ashore Soph had to pull me away from it; the children, the true children, were playing with its tail, pulling it side to side and pretending to knock each other over with it. I had the ringleader beneath the tail before I knew what I was doing, before I’d registered the blue face as he struggled to breathe under the weight. The barnacles, the few there were, cut him up good by the end.

‘There’s no noise.’ Soph lets the wind carry her words to me. We have gotten good at this.

‘Why would there be,’ I reply. I am truthful.

With my voice the water undulates, exhales, returns with a rush drawn out and low. With it, a dull hushing noise, rising to a distant crowd’s incohesive roaring. Then the burst: water spouts from the top of the rock, a hoarse cough of water and stone, the suckling sucking inhale between teeth immediately afterwards. Water rains on us in a fine mist, sticking eyelashes together and waking the skin, the scent of clean sweat fresh on our cheeks. The shape means nothing, it never did. Whaling Rock sounds like a Humpback breaching, it sounds like an animal between two worlds, bridging the gap. But the sound is dulled the second time, clear the third, then dulled again for the next three lifetimes we stand there in its rain. Soph tries but cannot stop me diving in on the next retreat of a wave, using its unflinching pull to slam me against the side. I can’t scale it until I sacrifice my shoes, tearing my linen shift and ripping skin from one finger. I don’t question my body. I let it lead me to the mouth of the rock, look inside, see the body alternately swallowed and crushed inside the blowhole. Pale arms and legs gleam in low light, a heart-shaped locket shining even under the water's surface; human. Its skin is an unmistakable blue, iridescent in the low light, moonlight gleaming off skin that isn’t quite scale, isn’t quite flesh. The Hunters have found us.